


Perspective Passage

by spyrograph



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-21
Updated: 2018-12-21
Packaged: 2019-09-23 20:00:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17086784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spyrograph/pseuds/spyrograph
Summary: Garak's return to Cardassia is less than triumphant.Originally written for theThree Sentence Ficathonon Dreamwidth





	Perspective Passage

Cardassia Prime is a beige and gray marble in the bottom right corner of the viewport; Garak presses his forehead against the transparent aluminum (it’s unseemly, but he doesn’t care what the other passengers think because he’s going home— he’s going home and he is not slipping in under cover of darkness, over pain of death, around the back of Mila's house like a thief) and he watches with baited breath as the planet grows larger.

Cardassia Prime is a melon, discolored and discarded by careless shopkeepers; Garak blames himself (it’s irrational, but he cannot shake the feeling that he could have prevented all this— if only he had remained in the Obsidian Order's good graces or if only he had been a little faster with rerouting the Defiant’s weapons systems or if, or if, or if) and he knows his hands are too small to wipe away the filth of two gory empires.

Cardassia Prime is a convex shape that fills the entire viewport when the transport’s re-entry protocols pull down shutters like cold eyelids; Garak closes his eyes and counts backwards from three thousand because the cabin is suddenly too small and shrinking fast (it’s all in his head, but that doesn’t stop his pulse from racing headlong into memories— the suffocating weight of blood-soaked rubble on Tzenketh, the airless crawlspace in Internment Camp 371 which stank of Enabran Tain, the tiled floor of the kitchen pantry where he had first learned to fear...) as the ship makes it’s final compromise with the planet’s gravity and settles onto the landing pad.

Cardassia Prime is the ground beneath his feet, the dust in the air, the travel-weary people queued for security screening, and the task-weary agent who makes the same demands of Garak as she does of every traveler: identification documents, travel permissions, place all your possessions here to be scanned... Garak doesn’t interrupt her by presenting his newly-issued credentials (it’s sentimental, but he can think of no reason not to indulge himself in this little lie— the simple pleasure of being a stranger among people who speak his native tongue, of being merely one more task in a line and handled just as impersonally as the man in front of him) but then his clearance is granted and there is no escaping her deferential gaze.


End file.
